Changes Since 0.5.0

Since 0.5.0, the config has been split into two different files.

System

System config is documented on the rest of this page, and has been moved
into bosun.toml unless overriden on the command line. Changes to these
settings require a Bosun restart in order to take effect. The TOML
format is documented here.

The file does not follow the tradition of commenting out defaults,
which are instead mostly documented below.

Definitions

This file is documented here. It includes settings that
do not require a Bosun restart to take effect e.g. alerts, templates,
notifications.

Keys

Hostname

The hostname that Bosun uses to construct its links. The common use case
is in any template functions that
construct links.

Example:
Hostname = "bosun.example.com"

HTTPListen

HTTP IP and Port to listen on. The default if not specified is to
listen on :8070. However, if HTTPSListen is defined and HTTPListen
is not defined there will be no default, and Bosun will only listen on
HTTPS.

Example:
HTTPListen = ":8080"

HTTPSListen

HTTPS (SSL) IP and Port to listen on. This requires that TLSCertFile and TLSKeyFile are defined.

TLSCertFile

Path to the PEM encoded certificate Bosun should use for
HTTPSListen. May contain intermediate certificates followed by the
leaf certificate to form a chain.

Example:
TLSCertFile = "/etc/ssl/certs/bosun.example.com.crt"

TLSKeyFile

Path to the PEM encoded private key that corresponds to the TLSCertFile.

Example:
TLSKeyFile = "/etc/ssl/certs/bosun.example.com.key"

CheckFrequency

Minimum interval that alert checks will run at on a schedule. The format
of the value is the same as Go’s duration
format. By default, alert
checks are run at every CheckFrequency multiplied by the
DefaultRunEvery value. This defaults to “5m”.

Example:
CheckFrequency = "1m"

DefaultRunEvery

By default, alert checks are run at every
CheckFrequency multiplied by the
DefaultRunEvery value. This can be overridden in an alert definition
with the runEvery keyword. This defaults to
1.

e.g. If CheckFrequency = 1m and a DefaultRunEvery = 5, alerts by
default will run every 5 minutes. But you could have some run as
frequent as every “1m”, and others that run less often (any multiple of
“1m”).

Example:
DefaultRunEvery = 5

RuleFilePath

Path to the file containing definitions of alerts, macros, lookups,
templates, notifications, and global variables which are documented
here. If saving is enabled, this file can be written to
by Bosun via the API or Save UI.
Mandatory.

Example: RuleFilePath = "dev.sample.conf"

MaxRenderedTemplateAge

If set, this will allow bosun to delete rendered templates from its’ data store.
It will remove all rendered templates for alerts that have been closed for longer than this time (in days).

Example: MaxRenderedTemplateAge = 30 # retain old templates for only 30 days

TimeAndDate

Used to configure time zones that will be linked to in Bosun’s
dashboard. It is an array of timeanddate.com zones (the page that gets
linked to from Bosun’s UI.) It has no impact on what time zone Bosun
operates in. Bosun is expected to use UTC and does support other
timezones.

Example:
TimeAndDate = [ 202, 75, 179, 136 ]

ShortURLKey

Bosun’s UI can generate short links using Google’s goo.gl URL Shortener service. If you are hitting their API limits, you can get an API key and specify here, and that key will get used.

Example:
ShortURLKey = "aKey"

MinGroupSize

Bosun’s dashboard will use grouping logic on the dashboard if there are many similar alerts (in name, or tag/key pairs). MinGroupSize sets the minimum number of alerts needed to create a group in the UI and defaults to 5.

If you have a lot of grouping, it often means you should refactor the alert to have a less granular scope. Therefore, it is recommended that this is used as a “protection mechanism” from flooding the dashboard with too many alerts.

Example: MinGroupSize = 5

Unknown Threshold

Bosun will group all unknowns in a single check cycle (alerts on the same CheckFrequency and RunEvery) into a single email. This sets how many unknowns would be sent in a single check cycle before a group is created. The default value is 5.

This is done because unknowns are generally caused by the data “disappearing”. So if your TSDB Provider is broken or behind, it can generate a lot of unknowns. This alleviates flooding in the specific case of unknowns.

Example: UnknownThreshold = 5

Ping

If set to true, Bosun will ping every value of the host tag that it has indexed and record that value to your TSDB. It currently only support OpenTSDB style data input, which is means you must use either OpenTSDB or Influx with the OpenTSDB endpoint on Influx configured.

Example:
Ping = true

PingDuration

How long Bosun should wait before stopping to ping host tags it has
seen. e.g. If the value is the default of "24h", if Bosun has
not indexed any data points for that host value, then it will stop
attempting to ping that host until it again sees data points that have that
tag.

Example:
PingDuration = "24h"

SearchSince

Controls how long autocomplete and items in UI will show up since being indexed by Bosun. The format of the value is the same as Go’s duration format and the default is 3 days. The goal is to make it so you don’t have old items showing up in the UI. However, if you are using OpenTSDB and graphing page, you can still query metrics that don’t autocomplete if you remember what they were (or look them up using OpenTSDB’s native UI autocomplete).

Example: SearchSince = "72h"

EnableSave

Enables saving via the web UI. It is disabled by default. When enabled,
users will be able to save the rule configuration file via the UI and
Bosun will then write to that file on the user’s behalf.

Example: EnableSave = true

ReloadEnabled

Sets if reloading of the rule configuration should be enabled. If
EnableSave is true, then reloading gets enabled regardless of this
setting. Reloads can be triggered via /api/reload in the REST
API as well.

Example:
EnableSave = true

CommandHookPath

When enabling saving, and a user issues a save, you have the option to run a executable or script by specifying this parameter. This allows you to do things like backup the file on writes or commit the file to a git repo.

This command is passed a filename, username, message, and vargs (vargs is currently not used). If the command exits a non-zero exit code, then the changes will be reverted (the file before the changes is copied back and Bosun doesn’t restart). When the configuration is saved via the user interface, any messages to standard error will be shown to the user when there is a non-zero exit code.

Example:
CommandHookPath = "/Users/kbrandt/src/hook/hook"

GetInternetProxy

Current code documentation says:

// GetInternetProxy sets a proxy for outgoing network requests from Bosun. Currently it
// only impacts requests made for shortlinks to https://goo.gl/

But not sure I trust that.

Configuration Sections

All your key value pairs must be defined before any sections are defined. Sections are used for things that have multiple values to configure them. In particular the various time series database providers.

RuleVars

Allows definition of variables that will be turned into global
variables available to definitions under
$sys.. This is designed for when you have some secrets you don’t want
exposed in the definitions file. The values of these variables can
still be accessed from Bosun’s rule editor and expression UI. This
merely hides them so you don’t accidentally include them in
screenshots or when copying and pasting your config.

DBConf

Defines what internal storage Bosun should use. There are currently two
choices, a built-in redis-like server called ledis or redis. Redis is
recommended for production setups.

The default is to use ledis. If Both Redis and ledis are defined, Redis will take preference and the ledis configuration will be ignored. Ledis is the default, so if RedisHost is not specified ledis will be used even if you have no DBConf configuration defined.

Username

Password

Example

OpenTSDBConf

Enables an OpenTSDB provider, and also enables OpenTSDB specific
functions in the expression
language. This also enables the Graph tab in Bosun’s UI as that is
OpenTSDB specific. However, you can still graph other time series DBs in
Bosun’s UI by using the Expression tab.

Host

OpenTSDB hostname and port to connect to.

Version

Either 2.1 or 2.2. Default: 2.1. If set to 2.2, certain features that
correspond to new OpenTDSB features are enabled e.g. filter
support.

ResponseLimit

Causes requests to error if the OpenTSDB response is larger than
this setting in bytes. This is useful to catch alerts that are pulling
in more data then they need to (i.e. maybe downsampling can be used.)

This does not cancel the query with OpenTSDB, but Bosun will stop processing the response.

Example

ElasticConf

Enables querying multiple Elastic clusters. The elastic expression
functions become available when
this is defined. The functions are designed more to be used for querying
log formatted data and stats from those logs.

The functions that would allow you to use Elastic effectively as a
time-series based backend do not currently exist.

Warning

The Elastic config format may change before the final 0.6.0 release.</a>.

ElasticConf.default

Hosts

List of hosts that are members of the cluster. Elastic uses these hosts
to discover all the other hosts in the cluster, so you don’t have to
specify every host in the cluster. This article
on Sniffing describes
how this discovery functions.

SimpleClient

Boolean determining when setting true periodic health checks and
sniffing will be disabled. This is useful when you want to query from a
single or fixed number of Elastic nodes.

GraphiteConf.Headers

Example

AnnotateConf

Embeds the annotation service. This enables the ability to submit and
edit annotations via the UI or API. It also enables the annotation
related expression functions. Currently the only supported database for
annotate is Elastic. It can be the same cluster as the one defined in
ElasticConf or a different one.

Warning

The format of annotation configuration may change before the final 0.6.0 release.</a>.

Hosts

As for ElasticConf.

SimpleClient

As for ElasticConf.

ClientOptions

As for ElasticConf.

Index

The Elastic index to store annotations in. If not set the default is “annotate”.

UserAgent

Example:

AuthConf

Bosun authentication settings. If not specified, your instance will have
no authentication, and will be open to anybody. When using Auth, TLS
should be used so credentials are not sent in clear text.

CookieSecret

A secret string used to encrypt cookies Bosun sets in client browsers to prevent token forgery. We recommend a longish random string here.

TokenSecret

Supplying this will activate “token authentication”, where you can generate api tokens that external apps and services can use to interact with Bosun. Should be a long random string.

AuthDisabled

Disable authentication. Set to true to allow any user to access and change Bosun. The main use case for using this vs omitting AuthConf altogether is setting to true,
and also enabling token auth to generate tokens before fully activating Authentication.

AuthConf.LDAP

LDAP authentication configuration.

AuthConf.LDAP.Domain

LDAP Domain name.

AuthConf.LDAP.LdapAddr

Host and port of LDAP server

AuthConf.LDAP.AllowInsecure

Set to true to skip certificate validation if you are running self-signed certs, for example.

AuthConf.LDAP.DefaultPermission

Default permissions that will be applied to any user who can authenticate to LDAP.

AuthConf.LDAP.RootSearchPath

Base search path for searching group and user memberships. Not needed if not specifying Group level permissions. Usually just DC=myOrg,DC=com is sufficient.

AuthConf.LDAP.Groups

Allows you to set permission levels per LDAP group. See example for usage.

AuthConf.LDAP.Users

Allows you to grant permissions to individual users. See example for usage.

Permissions

Various parts of the config allow you to specify permissions. These
fields accept a comma seperated list of roles or permissions. Available
roles and permissions are defined in the Bosun
source.
Any of the description values can be used as a permission in the config.
See example for some examples. If a user matches multiple Group or User permissions, they will have the aggregate of all permissions granted to those groups and users, as well as the defaults.